Commonwealth Confidential

Ratcheting up its effort to link Republican U.S. Senate candidate Pat Toomey to Tea Party candidates, Democrat Joe Sestak's campaign is hitting him Tuesday for what it says is a willingness to consider abolishing the Departments of Education, Commerce, Labor and Energy.

The Sestak campaign is citing Toomey's appearance Monday night on Larry Kudlow's show on CNBC. The exchange between Kudlow, who wrote the introduction to Toomey's 2009 book on free-market principles The Road to Prosperity, "demonstrated just how extreme his positions are," the Sestak campaign said in a statement.

Here is a transcript:

Kudlow: Would you abolish the Labor Department? Would you abolish the Commerce Department? Would you abolish the Energy Department? Would you abolish the Education Department?

Toomey: Probably not, Larry. I want to look at individual programs within those departments and see where do we have an opportunity to cut some spending, but I'm not sure that the entire program ought to be abolished."

Some of the Tea Party-backed Republican Senate nominees have called for the elimination of one, more or all of those cabinet departments, and Democrats have been attempting to show that Toomey, despite his unflappable reasonable manner, shares some of those views, which they consider extreme.

The use of "probably" and "not sure," to Sestak's people, mean that Toomey has not ruled it out. Expect to hear about this on the stump today.